Saudi Arabia has denied that its crown prince was responsible for hacking Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’ phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A message from a phone number used by the prince has been implicated in the data breach, according to reports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The kingdom’s US embassy said the stories were “absurd” and called for an investigation into them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Relations\n between Saudi Arabia and Mr Bezos – who owns the Washington Post – \nworsened after one of the newspaper’s staff was killed in a Saudi \nconsulate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent critic of the Saudi \ngovernment, was murdered in Istanbul months after this alleged \ncyber-attack took place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a blog post last year, Mr Bezos insinuated that the Saudi regime was unhappy with the “the Post’s essential and unrelenting coverage” of the killing. “It is undoubtedly unpopular in certain circles,” he wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mr Bezos’ phone was hacked after receiving a WhatsApp message in\n May 2018 that was sent from Mohammed bin Salman’s personal account, \naccording to the Guardian newspaper<\/a> which broke the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An\n investigation into the data breach reportedly found that the \nbillionaire’s phone had started secretly sharing huge amounts of data \nafter he received an encrypted video file from the prince.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Twitter account of the kingdom’s US embassy <\/a>issued an outright denial of the claims.\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Media captionMohammed bin Salman is asked: “Did you order the murder of Jamal Khashoggi?”\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the BBC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The\n allegations are based on a report that was commissioned by the private \nsecurity firm FTI Consulting, which was hired by Mr Bezos. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Two UN officials are expected to make a statement about the credibility of the allegations later on Wednesday. \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Image copyright\n Reuters\n \n \n \n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Hacking ‘horribly easy to do’<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n While\n the details of how this happened aren’t yet public, evidence is \npointing towards a WhatsApp conversation between the two men during \nwhich an infected video file was allegedly sent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is unclear \nwhat the content of that video was, but there is huge interest in \nfinding out what a crown prince might send to one of the world’s most \npowerful tech leaders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such a hack is “horribly easy to do”, says \ncomputer expert Professor Alan Woodward. The seemingly innocent video \nwould have contained malware that surreptitiously installed itself on \nthe targeted phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From there it would have been possible for the\n hacker to gain access to all the functions of the phone, from the GPS \nlocator, to the camera, to the banking facilities and messaging apps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such access is made possible via bugs in the code and, last year, a security flaw in WhatsApp was revealed<\/a> that would have allowed hackers to hide malicious code inside video files. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Phone\n hacking is, says Prof Woodward, all too common in certain countries \nthat are keen to keep an eye on journalists, dissidents and other \nactivists perceived to be a threat to their regimes. So-called \nstalkerware is available off the shelf to these governments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But what about the involvement of the Saudi crown prince? Was it really him who installed the malware? <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\n is unlikely that he set the phone up himself. So was his phone also \nbeing spied on? Or was he simply a vessel being used by the Saudi \nauthorities?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The plot thickens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reports come after private information about Mr Bezos was leaked to the American tabloid the National Enquirer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In\n February 2019 Mr Bezos accused the National Enquirer of “extortion and \nblackmail” after it published text messages between him and his \ngirlfriend, former Fox television presenter Lauren S\u00e1nchez.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A month earlier he and MacKenzie Bezos, his wife of 25 years, had announced that they planned to divorce having been separated for a “long period”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An investigator for the Amazon founder later said Saudi Arabia was behind the National Enquirer leak<\/a> and had accessed his data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Our\n investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that \nthe Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, and gained private information,” \nGavin de Becker wrote on the Daily Beast website at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mr de Becker linked the hack to the Washington Post’s coverage of the murder of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Saudi Arabia has denied that its crown prince was responsible for hacking Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’ phone. A message from a phone number used by the prince has been implicated in the data breach, according to reports. The kingdom’s US embassy said the stories were “absurd” and called for an investigation into them. Relations between Saudi Arabia and Mr Bezos… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":137,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/137"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3952"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3953,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3952\/revisions\/3953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/middleeastandnorthafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}